In recent years, there have been proposed technologies in which household electrical appliances are connected to an in-home network through which a plurality of household electrical appliances are remotely controlled to operate conjunctively. For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2003-22224 discloses a technology in which a conjunctive operation table is used to present to the user a user interface for performing conjunctive operations.
In conventional conjunctive operation control, the user interface is uniformly presented to the user based on a predetermined conjunctive operation table. Therefore, there are problems where a user interface in accordance with the type of a terminal device to be remotely controlled might not be presentable to the user, any device controlled by a different protocol might not be controllable, and furthermore, a wide variety of services provided via the Internet might not be utilizable.
In view of such problems, the present invention aims to provide an information processing device capable of dynamically generating a user interface in accordance with the type of each device and presenting the user interface to the user, in which the user interface is used for controlling the information processing device, remotely controlling at least one other device connected to a network, and controlling conjunctive operations between the information processing device and the other device. The present invention also aims to provide an information processing device capable of dynamically generating a user interface as described above in accordance with the type of each information processing device controlled by a different protocol and presenting the user interface to the user. The present invention further aims to provide a home network system consisting of such information processing devices.